For centuries human beings have exploited puffins, harvesting them by the thousand on their breeding grounds for their food and feathers. Over time, though, this relationship has changed, so that today we have come to love them, celebrating their quirky character and comical appearance and giving them a central place in our affections – a journey described by the environmental historian Dr Rob Lambert as the shift “from use to delight”.

How ironic, then, that just as we have come to truly appreciate them, our own existence now threatens theirs. The climate crisis threatens almost all the world’s roughly 11,000 species of birds, but its consequences have particularly dire significance for seabirds, whose life cycle is so intimately connected to the timing and abundance of their food supplies.

Warming oceans result in fish such as sand eels shifting their range into cooler waters, and thus either declining or disappearing from the seas around seabird breeding colonies. If puffins need to travel further to their feeding areas, or take longer to find and catch food once they get there, then their chicks have a lower chance of fledging.